A Completely Different TV Show Marriage Changed the Plot of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’

Mary Tyler Moore was never supposed to be a TV star. Okay, maybe in, like, a cosmic sense, that’s not true, but she wasn’t supposed to be a star on The Dick Van Dyke Show when it premiered in 1961. Initially, the series was supposed to revolve around Rob Petrie’s work as a TV comedy writer, but the real TV comedy writers had so much fun writing for Moore’s character as Petrie’s wife that they shifted focus to his home life. This actually caused considerable tension between Moore and Rose Marie, who played one of Petrie’s colleagues. It was a hard time to be a woman on TV, with only about two and a half good roles to go around at any given time.

Despite the somewhat catfighty beginnings, Moore became the most family-friendly feminist hero you could put on TV in 1961, meaning it was mostly her pants. She didn’t want to be “running the vacuum with these flowered frocks and high heels on,” so she insisted on wearing her now-iconic capri pants, despite the pearl-clutching at CBS. (Just kidding — TV executives weren’t the ones wearing pearls.)

When she got her own show a decade later, however, she envisioned herself as a slightly bolder representation of independent women. The Mary Tyler Moore Show begins with Mary Richards moving to Minneapolis on the heels of a broken engagement, but Moore and the show’s creators wanted her to be the first divorced TV star. That was met with even more resistance from the executives at CBS, but not for the reason you’d think.

Of course, divorce was a hot-button issue at the time that the network wasn’t hyped to take a side on, but they had an even bigger problem: Moore’s previous TV marriage. Rob and Laura Petrie were one of TV’s most beloved couples of the ‘60s. What if viewers couldn’t distinguish between Moore’s characters, and no matter how much information this new series revealed about Mary Richards’ ex-husband, viewers couldn’t shake the idea that she’d divorced Rob Petrie? 

It’s not as stupid as it sounds. That kid who played King Joffrey got death threats.

“They had to go head-to-head with CBS over the premise,” Moore later recalled, and unlike the war of the leg fabric, they lost this battle. Not only was it agreed that Mary Richards wouldn’t be divorced, she left her fiance specifically because she didn’t believe he really wanted to get married, and that’s what it was all about in 1970, right, ladies? 

Intentionally or not, it was also an important dividing line between Moore’s fictional love interests. Rob Petrie simply would never.